which a formal criticism of this philosophy would conduct us, implying, as such a criticism would do, a full determination of the province of a priori reasoning in its relation to the facts of experience. The practised eye must have observed a connexion with many earlier and later schemes of a kindred description, even in the rough outline of it we have now given.
The attentive student, of the sketch which we have attempted, has perhaps already recognised in the central principle of this system of universal philosophy, a relation to one of the cardinal questions of metaphysical science, and a curious coincidence in the history of philosophy. By his subtle process of reasoning, Leibnitz virtually excludes the possibility of an external world. The last result of his analysis is a created aggregate of unextended spiritual forces, of various orders, and of which the mutual relations, as collocated in bodies, originate the phenomena of the visible creation.
While the author of the Monadologie was in this manner resolving all creation into immaterial elements, a philosopher of another country, and of a different school, was approaching, perhaps more consciously, to a similar conclusion by a different course. Trained in the doctrines of Bacon and Locke, but receiving them into a soul that delighted to hold converse with Plato, and ignorant of the high questions agitated in Germany by his contemporary, he deduced from the principles of the English philosophy a system of idealism, which, besides its seductions for the imagination, is urged in a spirit and for a purpose that must ever render venerable
